Thank you for playing, Mr. Frum. Good-night.

So she wasn’t a federal judge and she isn’t a law school prof. That is supposed to be some guarnatee of quality? Um, no they aren’t, although I am not surprised that law professors and judges find those traits to be the only important qualifications. (heh)

The Court is a political player, and nominations are political gambits. That’s the way the Constitution is written. The President has to get the nominee out of the Senate committee, avoid a filibuster, and get a majority floor vote. I have continuously said (cooment at Dean’s World and elsewhere) that he hasn’t the Senate votes to break a filibuster on an obvious conservative with a long track record and that to lose such a fight would be disasterous. He had difficulty getting John Bolton to the UN, and John Roberts still had over twenty Senators voting against him. There is no way he was going to court a fight he was going to lose just to give many others the showdown fight they want, and he certainly isn’t going to anger the GOP Senators by forcing them to fight when they don’t want to (he still has three years to go, and cheesing off the Senate means nothing of his agenda gets through).

He seems, to me, to be putting what is possible above ideology. He isn’t going to engage in a Banzai charge. For that he is castigated. And he is called the dumb one. Sounds more to me like discipline, focus, and vision.

And I’m not necessarily sure she’s non-traditional, given that she’s a government lawyer (and has been for ten years now), and we’ve had tons of those on the Court.

That said, you’ve gotta be able to give a reason for any nomination, and the Bush folks, and the only reason they’ve given is, “trust us.” And then when you ask for any reasons to trust them, they clam up and say it’s privileged.

And when that fails, you’ve got former RNC Chairmen running around DC accusing folks who aren’t sure abut Miers of being elitist or sexist.

Yes, the Administration took a page out of the NARAL playbook, even when the charge is on its face ridiculous, given how the supposed mysogenists went to the mat for Priscilla Owen (who went to Baylor for undergrad and law school and never clerked for anyone) or Janice Rogers-Brown (who went to CS-Sacramento and then UCLA for law school).

I agree that it’s good to have a couple of non-traditional Justices, and no, I don’t really have any names of people I think would be good from outside of academia or the federal appeals courts because, but I have serious reservations about Miers nonetheless.

As to lowering the bar, I think it all boils down to whether the bar really has been lowered with this pointment. If it has been lowered significantly, we’ll soon know, and this action will create an equal and opposite reaction – either in terms of the nomination itself fizzling, or in terms of “not another Miers!” replacing the current “not another Souter!” battle cry on the right. The left doesn’t really have an analogue for that right now, given that the last “stealth” conservative, Byron White, goes all the way back to the JFK Administration. But if the principal objection to Miers is that she is judicially incompetent, and not merely ideogically unacceptable to one group or another, then presumably “not another Miers!” would resonate just as much on the left as it would on the right.

On the flip side, if a consensus emerges that she’s a perfectly good Justice, then I’m not sure it is fair to say the bar will have been “lowered” so much as moved sideways to include litigators. Then the left bar would move sideways as well, and we’d see the Dems appointing people like, say, David Boies. I’m not sure that’s any better or worse than what the Dems appoint now; just different. But if Miers’s nomination fizzles, or if she is appointed but blows it on the Court, she’ll basically close the door on all of them.